New crime fiction | Books | The Guardian Buy it at BOL Pagan Babies marks a triumphant return to form for America's finest crime writer. Year on year for three decades, Elmore Leonard has produced crime novels that, with few exceptions, have set the bench mark for other US writers. But while in the second half of the Nineties the triple whammy of the movie versions of Get Shorty, Jackie Brown and Out of Sight established his wider popularity - and his credentials as the hippest writer around - he seemed to be losing his way. Cuba Libre (1998) was a not entirely successful quasi-return to the decidedly un-hip western stories that first established his reputation in the Fifties. A collection of those very stories came out the following year alongside his first sequel, Be Cool, the further adventures of Get Shorty's Chili Palmer. The novel had his trademark tight plotting, colourful characters and tough-funny dialogue but the elderly Leonard set it, unwisely, in the youth music business. There were, in consequence, some embarrassing passages. Pagan Babies is, in some ways, his most ambitious novel yet.

I can't think of (m)any authors who would have the confidence to set a crime story involving a clever but heartless con against the background of the Rwandan genocide - and then make it succeed both as a comedy and a love story of sorts. The central character, Father Terry Dunn, is an unlikely priest. With a background in cigarette smuggling and tax evasion, he starts the novel in the Rwandan war zone with a church converted to a tomb for 47 unburied, mutilated victims of a Hutu massacre. His idea of penance for some of the murderers necessitates a swift return to Detroit where he sets out to raise money for orphaned children (his pagan babies). A meeting with wannabe stand-up comic Debbie Dewey gets him involved in her attempts to get back at a low-life who cheated her out of $67,000. The resulting scam involves hustling the mob, encounters with an exceedingly stupid hitman and a mordant story of con and counter-con, double-cross and triple-cross. There are few superlatives left unused to describe Leonard's writing but Pagan Babies warrants superlatives for the way the fast-paced narrative is both moving and highly amusing. Remarkable.

Lawrence Block is another of American crime writing's multi-award winning old pros, with almost 50 novels and six collections of short stories to his credit. He already has three series characters - PI Matthew Scudder, bookshop owner-cum-burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr and spy Evan Tanner - but now there's a fourth, hitman John Keller. Keller had an engaging outing in last year's Hit Man, which was both an episodic novel and a collection of short stories. He returns in Hit List, a more traditional mystery novel in which he is appalled to discover that he is somebody else's target. Keller is a likeable creation. Although you might think that Pulp Fiction and Grosse Point Blank had taken the notion of quirkily attractive hitmen as far as it can go, Block takes a different line with his character. There's nothing cool about Keller, even though in this novel he has an affair with a SoHo artist. He looks like a corporate man, always wears suits and ties and does his work to pay for the cost of his hobby - stamp collecting. He even does jury service. Block's casual, meandering approach to telling his story may jar or entertain, according to taste.

There's a lot of off-the-narrative-point chat between Keller and his 'broker', Dot. Sometimes their chat and Keller's ruminations about the big and small things in life are hilarious; sometimes they are wearisome - Keller is no Socrates Fortlow, Walter Mosley's philosophising ex-con. An enjoyable read, nevertheless. British writer Robert Goddard's novels are not easy to categorise. His 12 contemporary and historical bestsellers - which include Past Caring, Caught in the Light, Set in Stone and Into the Blue, which made a disappointing TV film several years ago - have been variously described as mysteries, crime novels, thrillers and even historical romances. What they have in common is a strong narrative thrust and ingenious plotting, elements which are robustly evident in Sea Change. This picaresque tale of high adventure and low intrigue takes place in 1721-22, just after the South Sea Bubble has burst. Goddard's novels almost always feature an ineffectual protagonist and William Spandrel, the impoverished mapmaker who is the central character here, is, by dint of circumstances, extremely ineffectual.

Entrusted with the secret delivery to Amsterdam of a great MacGuffin - an account book whose contents implicate the highest in the land in the corruption surrounding the South Sea Company - he swaps debtors prison in London for the threat of the hangman's noose in Holland. Thereafter, in an effort to clear himself, he embarks on a long, hazardous journey to the Jacobite court in Rome, where he gets embroiled in further intrigue. He is duped at every turn in every country he passes through by a wonderful cast of crooks, charlatans and real historical characters such as Robert Walpole, the future Chancellor of the Exchequer. In Sea Change, the historical period is vividly conjured up and the narrative flows effortlessly. There is more adventure and less mystery in this than in some of Goddard's other books, but the result is engrossing, storytelling of a very high order. Another week, another much loved fictional police detective bites the dust. H.R.F. Keating's latest Inspector Ghote novel, Breaking and Entering, will be the last.

The Bombay police inspector first made his appearance a startling 36 years ago in the Gold Dagger-winning The Perfect Murder, published in 1964. And to bring the series happily full circle, the new novel reunites Ghote with Axel Svensson, the Swedish friend who helped him solve that perfect murder so many years ago. This time, the duo are trying to solve the murder of a wealthy businessman in a tightly secure mansion at the same time as they are tracking down an ingenious cat-burglar who has been stealing jewellery from high-rise apartment blocks. Although it's the last in the series - Keating has already embarked on a new non-Indian series - there's nothing elegiac about the novel. Indeed, it's as fresh, lively and entertaining as the first - a delight. Turned Collar Turned Collar In Elmore Leonard's novel, a not-quite-priest is quite adept at scamming the Detroit mob. Related Links 263 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $24.95. lmore Leonard is one of our finest humorists, especially when he is not trying to be funny.

The humor lies in his wickedly acute depictions of human nature: the greedy dreams of schemers like Harry Arno in ''Pronto'' (1993), the cool stupidity of psychopaths like Armand Degas in ''Killshot'' (1989) or the devious ways of women like Lucy Nichols in ''Bandits'' (1987). The humor works because Leonard is going not for laughs but for truth. We laugh because we recognize people we know and sometimes, though it can be hard to admit, something of ourselves in the flawed, very real people of his hard-boiled crime novels. But then there are the times, as with ''Pagan Babies,'' when Leonard seems to be self-consciously writing comedy.

That is when we encounter someone like Father Terry Dunn, who did some work for the Detroit mob, skipped the country to avoid arrest, adopted the identity of a Roman Catholic priest, got himself a church in (of all places) Rwanda, stood idly by as machete-wielding Hutu villagers murdered his Tutsi flock, later shot down four of them in a strange act of contrition, fled Rwanda, returned to the United States and started scamming the top mobster in Detroit for a donation for the orphaned ''pagan babies.'' Does he sound anything like you or anyone you know? Father Dunn is an over-the-top character reminiscent of such Carl Hiaasen creations as the former Florida governor who lives in the Everglades and collects road kill for supper. This is fine for Hiaasen, who is better than Leonard at this sort of thing anyway; but for Leonard it is a dead-end descent into parody and a departure from his strength as a wry observer of humanity.  Featured Author: Elmore Leonard The thing of it is, Leonard is such a marvelous writer that even his mistakes are worth reading.

''Pagan Babies'' has the same fast pace, crackling dialogue and dark ironies we've come to expect from every Elmore Leonard novel for the last 20 years. And there are some well-drawn characters, especially a small-time thug named Johnny Pajonny. When Father Dunn skipped town for Rwanda, he took Pajonny's dirty money with him and left him to take the fall for the crime they committed together. Pajonny is so dumb that Dunn later is able to persuade him that all of this was actually his fault. However, just as we have dismissed Pajonny as a comic loser, he demonstrates unexpected loyalty to an undeserving friend. In fact, the book as a whole is a sharp exploration of loyalty and disloyalty, trust and betrayal. Leonard's early crime novels, like ''Mr. Majestyk'' (1974) and ''City Primeval'' (1980), are grim crime stories peopled by enraged vigilantes and determined policemen.

But as he gained confidence as a writer, he loosened up, got to know his characters better and discovered that, as with Chili Palmer of ''Get Shorty,'' (1990), they could be both serious and funny at the same time. In fact, it's the seriousness that makes the humor possible, and Leonard understands this. He once recounted his response to a script sent him by Bruce Willis. In the place where a bartender tossed off a hard-boiled line, the stage direction called for the character to grin and wink. Wrong, Leonard told Willis. The line may have been funny but the character was serious about what he was saying. The movie version of ''Get Shorty'' may be where the trouble started. Its director, Barry Sonnenfeld, played it strictly for laughs, casting Danny DeVito in the title role. Leonard loved the movie but was surprised by it. ''I didn't realize I had written such a funny book,'' he said at the time. Since then, with both ''Pagan Babies'' and ''Be Cool'' (1999) he sometimes has worked too hard for laughs. It's a mistake, like making a wrong turn down a one-way street.

Leonard is so skillful that he avoids head-on collisions, but that doesn't mean the turn was a good idea. Bruce DeSilva, news/features editor of The Associated Press, is writing his first novel. Review | Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard Reviewed by Frederick Zackel At 74 years of age, Elmore Leonard is a living American treasure. In 36 novels over the past half-century, he has demonstrated that when you step outside the law, you have stepped into a very chaotic, violent universe that can also be very, very funny. His latest bestselling novel, Pagan Babies, is another genuine high point in a career that already includes Hombre, Out of Sight and Get Shorty. But what gets me is that, if he weren't so damn successful as a writer of page-turners (as the New York publishing houses call them), elitist academics and lit-crits would have recognized by now that he is a toiler on the same spiritual highway as that deified literary great Flannery O'Connor.

Leonard may be known as the Dickens of Detroit (I think Stephen King started that nickname), but don't let his Michigan residency fool you -- his heart and soul lie on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line. When I interviewed him three years ago, Leonard told me that in his youth, "I read Flannery O'Connor, and maybe she influenced me as a Southern writer. I always felt more a Southern writer, closer to the South than I am to being a crime writer. Oh, I read Hammett and Chandler. Hammett was OK. I read Chandler, certainly, but I didn't learn anything from him.... "I write crime, not mysteries," Leonard qualifies. "I don't read mysteries. I never cared who did it. I think the bad guy is more fun than the good guy. And in mysteries there's a puzzle, and puzzles don't interest me. Mysteries are all plot; plot doesn't interest me." Consider that Leonard was born the same year as Flannery O'Connor -- 1925. (She died in 1964.) They both spent their most formative years in the South, O'Connor in Milledgeville, Georgia, and Leonard in Memphis, Tennessee.

"I loved Memphis," Leonard says. He cried when his family moved to Detroit. He was then 9 years old. Both writers were reared Roman Catholic. O'Connor became a fundamentalist Catholic, for lack of a better definition. For her, we are all blighted by Original Sin. We are all God's screw-ups and we all desperately need redemption. She felt that Christians should live every moment in the shadow of Death, who will arrive -- in the words of Christ -- "like a thief in the night." Leonard went to Catholic schools from first grade on. This included the University of Detroit High School (where he says he "learned how to think") and the University of Detroit, both Jesuit institutions. He attended Mass daily until the early 1970s, when he felt the need to join Alcoholics Anonymous and substituted that program's principles for the Catholic Church's disciplines. (He now attends Mass infrequently.) In AA, he explains, "you try to develop a direct relationship with God, or a higher power, as you understand the concept.

The main idea of the program is to 'let go and let God,' to get rid of your hang-ups and try to live your everyday life as an instrument of God's purpose, and that is to show love to one another." Leonard joined AA in 1974, "but it took three years for the program to sink in. Finally on January 24, 1977, I had my last drink." Leonard writes hard-boiled crime fiction the way Flannery O'Connor writes hard-boiled crime in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Compare O'Connor's Misfit with any of Leonard's gothic villains, whether it's the Oklahoma Wildman, Clement Mansell, from City Primeval, Mama's Boy Teddy Magyk from Glitz, or any of his Florida loony crackers named Crowe. The fact that they can be compared is because both Leonard and O'Connor grew up with the same sensational, real-life killers.

During my first interview with him on May 23, 1997, Leonard offhandedly pointed out that it was the 63rd anniversary of the day Bonnie (Parker) and Clyde (Barrow) were shot to death on an Oklahoma road, ending their legendary careers as Depression-era holdup artists. That he knew the anniversary date so readily surprised even Leonard. "I read somewhere that the most impressionable age for children is between 5 and 10," he told me. "I was between 5 and 10 when all those desperadoes were roaming the Midwest and holding up banks. They were kind of folk heroes. So many homes and farms had been repossessed, taken back by the banks, that when the banks were robbed, people cheered. And they could forgive the desperadoes for killing someone who occasionally got in the way. Those bank robbers of the 30s truly influenced me. John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd -- that's what I'm doing today." Not exactly robbing banks, but writing about folks who could. Who do. Who do worse than that.

Although their details can be engrossing and memorable, the basic plot of every Elmore Leonard novel is the same: A handful of poseurs -- role-players at villainy -- meet up, compare notes on their bizarre past histories, find themselves compatible in their approach to criminality and then decide to become partners and go for a Big Score. Before the game is over, these wannabes will cross paths with somebody who isn't role-playing, who isn't play-acting, who is as ruthless as they only imagine they can be. The poseurs won't recognize that inner no-nonsense, that inner ruthlessness -- and that's when violence splatters the walls. Knowing this formula, however, won't prepare you for page one of Leonard's new novel. * * * Pagan Babies plops us down into post-genocide Rwanda, a landscape of horror where, in 1994, 800,000 Tutsi natives were murdered by the Hutus over a three-month period -- "a full-scale attempt at genocide that barely made the six o'clock news," as Leonard writes. Father Terry Dunn, "a bearded young man in a white cassock," is living on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

He has been in Rwanda for three very long years. During his first celebration of Mass upon his arrival in Africa, Dunn's church was overrun by Hutu militiamen who slaughtered his congregation while the priest stood by, shocked but unable to do anything. That parish church has since been sealed shut -- with the butchered bodies of 47 men, women and children left inside, all victims of the Rwanda massacre. For the past five years Dunn has been running on empty and spinning his wheels. He hears the occasional confession and reads Dr. Seuss to the native children. He gets by on goat stew, homegrown ganja and Johnnie Walker Red. Not surprisingly Dunn seems moments away from full-blown post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the confessional, for instance, when one penitent wonders if he can receive forgiveness if he kills the Hutu militia member who slaughtered his entire family, Dunn asks, "Is the guy bigger than you?" When the penitent says no, the priest tells him, "Walk up to the guy and hit him in the mouth as hard as you can, with a rock. You'll feel better.

Now make a good Act of Contrition for everything you've done and forgot about." And then -- on the same day he receives a letter saying that his mother has died in his absence -- Dunn commits a most unpriestly act of divine wrath, which convinces him that it's probably a good time to return to the United States. Father Terry's brother, Fran, is a Detroit lawyer who specializes in accident-injury cases. Fran introduces him to Debbie Dewey, who has just been released from Sawgrass Correctional Institute in Florida, after doing time for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Debbie has discovered her true mission in life behind the walls: she wants to do standup comedy. Like all good role-players, Debbie makes her crime out to be more serious than it actually was. As part of her stage act, she tells her audience, "I was visiting my mom in Florida and happened to run into my ex-husband ... with a Buick Rivera." In truth, she confesses to Father Terry, it was a Ford Escort.

Debbie's immediate goal is revenge against that very same ex-husband, Randy Agley, a con man who swept her off her feet and separated her from her $50,000 in savings. After Randy left Debbie, he married a wealthy woman, who has only recently divorced him. But before this second woman left, Randy managed to swindle a few million dollars and a tony restaurant in Detroit out of her. Debbie is naturally attracted to Terry Dunn. Especially after she discovers that when he left America five years ago, it was just a step ahead of his being indicted for tax fraud. It seems Dunn and two Pajonny brothers -- high school "friends" -- were involved in smuggling cigarettes from Kentucky into Detroit. As Fran Dunn explains it, "Terry left right after they were busted and the Pajonnys rolled over on him to plead down, saying it was his idea and he took off with their share. So on the strength of that Terry was indicted, but by then he was in Africa." Fran notes that, of course, his brother was different in those days: "Terry wasn't a priest yet when he got involved with the cigarettes.

He wasn't ordained till he got over there, and took his vows." Apparently, before he became a man of the cloth, Terry Dunn was the archetypal Leonard hero, "a real hardnose, played football three years in high school, liked to box -- he'd take on bigger guys, it didn't matter. Even if he was getting beat up he always hung in." This less holy side of the priest gives Debbie Dewey ideas. Big ideas. She wants him to help her siphon $250,000 away from her ex-hubby, Randy, and some of his newfound friends in the Detroit Mob. Seems that Randy Agley "became a gangster about two months after opening [his] restaurant," when Vincent Moraco, a low-level Detroit mob guy, slid his slimy tentacles into Randy's operations, bringing "some high-class girls" in with him. But Randy has since grown unhappy with his underworld links. "By the end of April," Leonard writes, "nine months into the arrangement, Randy's mob connection had cost him $116,200 out-of-pocket.

He still saw himself as a wiseguy, but no longer on the level of a [Lucky] Luciano. Christ, Luciano would've had Moraco whacked by now and taken over the girls." Randy is worried that his maitre d' will quit over "those goombas who'd show up, no reservation, and squeeze into Booth Number One without asking." In addition, the new linen service, "owned by Moraco's boss, cost twice what it should. And the Mutt, the Mutt was five bills a week down a rathole. What did he do? The girls, the ones who showed up, didn't need protection." The Mutt (real name: Searcy J. Bragg Jr.) is another terrific Leonard creation. He's a farmboy-turned-killer from Indiana, dumb as grass but no-nonsense as a rock. Like any enterprising young hitman, the Mutt is willing to kill anybody for a price. He makes a deal with Randy Agley to kill Vincent Moraco for $25,000. All the Mutt needs to do the job is get himself a gun. And a driver for the getaway car. And a getaway car.

There are no straight lines in this novel's plot. Dunn and Debbie may be falling in love as they set out to con Randy -- or is that just part of the con, too? The moronic Mutt may actually be the smartest member of this bunch, but can he carry out Randy's contract on Moraco at the same time as he fulfills another contract from Moraco to kill Terry Dunn for trying to con the mob? Amid a deluge of story line twists and ever-quirkier characters, we lose ourselves in Leonard's marvelous worlds of words. We hardly notice how, along the way, he cheerfully skewers the all-too-human ego and repeatedly deflates the balloon of human vanity. And of course every step of the way he confounds the reader's expectations. Father Terry, for instance, has a most remarkable confession to make before the book is done. * * * In Elmore Leonard's world, everybody weasels and the wise man should suspect that. In fact, all the players in Pagan Babies are sneakily making plans to score the Big Score and screw everybody else in the game. The greatest fun is watching those best-laid plans unravel.

Because the point of view constantly changes in Leonard's novels, because he is not committed to any one character, his pacing is always just a step ahead of any reader. Predictability is diminished, while suspense is built in as neatly as a kitchen cabinet in a custom home. Leonard never writes to formula. His novels are not scripted. Their endings are always up in the air. And despite all I know about Elmore Leonard and his techniques, he still had me buffaloed at the end of Pagan Babies. It's a lovely book. | December 2000 Book Review: ‘Pagan Babies’ – EW.com True Crime, Fiction We gave it an A God bless Elmore Leonard. As the venerable author of Get Shorty and Out of Sight approaches his 75th birthday, he could’ve kicked back and turned out another expertly plotted caper set on the Detroit-Miami-L.A. criminal axis he’s so often explored. But that would’ve been too easy. This time he’s thrown Rwanda into the mix. Leonard’s latest novel, Pagan Babies, opens with the bone-chilling image of 47 mutilated bodies rotting in a Rwandan church.

A parish priest (or is he?), American expatriate Terry Dunn witnessed the massacre of these Tutsi natives by Hutu marauders five years earlier and has been trying to arrange for proper burials ever since. The writer carves a deeply ingrained portrait of the African nation, a land where the locals slurp banana beer from long tin troughs and a Tutsi asks in confession for God’s forgiveness in advance before he kills his Hutu enemy. ”Hit him in the mouth as hard as you can, with a rock,” Terry counsels him irreverently. ”You’ll feel better.” Terry eventually returns to his (and Leonard’s) home turf of Michigan, but the ghosts of Rwanda haunt the rest of the story, as Terry can’t escape the gruesome memories. It turns out he had fled the U.S. while under a tax-fraud indictment for a cigarette-smuggling scheme. Accepting the help of big brother Fran, a personal-injury lawyer, Terry meets investigator Debbie Dewey. A former go-go girl and aspiring stand-up comedian, she’s recently been released from a Florida prison for assaulting her ex-boyfriend with a deadly weapon — a Ford Escort, to be exact.

Con artist Terry and ex-con Debbie are instantly drawn to each other, and together they hatch a plan to shake down her swindling old beau, Randy Agley, who’s now the owner of a swanky restaurant in downtown Detroit. What follows is a string of double crosses and near misses with death, as the Mafia inevitably becomes involved. Briskly paced (at only 263 pages — N.B., J.K. Rowling and Tom Clancy), Pagan Babies skitters along to its movingly unconventional ending. A fascinating paradox of a man, Terry possesses the capacity for both brutal violence and profound compassion. He’s matched in complexity by Debbie, a smart, tart cookie who channels her anger and aggression into her darkly funny monologues. The supporting cast is similarly multicolored — from Chantelle Nyamwase, Terry’s one-armed Rwandan housekeeper, to Searcy J. Bragg Jr. (a.k.a. the Mutt), an Indiana-born wiseguy who’s not as dumb as he seems. Leonard provides these characters with his trademark note-perfect dialogue. ”I didn’t have enough tit to be a star,” Debbie recalls of her abbreviated exotic-dancing career.

”And really, to do it for a living you have to be on crack.” Every time mobbed-up lawyer Ed Bernacki uses the word Mafia, he appends it with the phrase ” … if in fact such an organization exists.” And when the Mutt is asked if he’d whack a Catholic priest, he reasons, ”I guess it’s okay, I’m Baptist.” Like Quentin Tarantino (who turned the author’s Rum Punch into Jackie Brown), Leonard peppers his writing with pop-culture references; On the Town, Andy Garcia, and My Dinner With André are invoked on one page of Pagan Babies alone. He’s not above taking a few well-placed shots, either. The worst part of prison life, Debbie says, was being forced to watch Family Matters (”Urkel’s a nerdy black kid with the most annoying voice I’ve ever heard,” she says. ”And the ladies in the dorm’d cry laughing at him.”) It’s this kind of evocative detail that makes Pagan Babies such a pleasure. You can’t help but feel a visceral thrill when Leonard describes goon Vincent Moraco’s mistress as having ”the whitest legs Vincent had ever seen in his life, like f—in marble.

Except they were always warm you ran a hand up them.” Yet this is more than just an accumulation of brilliant moments. The ambitious scope of Pagan Babies marks it as a literary leap forward for its creator. The Rwandan motif lends the book a gravitas lacking from his more lighthearted efforts. ”With practice, you could become a visionary,” Chantelle tells Terry. With nearly a half century of practice, Elmore Leonard has become one as well. A Show Full Article Review: Pagan Babies: a Novel - Books - The Austin Chronicle by Elmore Leonard Delacorte, 263 pp., $24.95 Over time, readers sometimes overlook favorite writers who are overly prolific, take them for granted because they've been stalwarts of the bestseller lists for years or even decades. There's no harm in missing their newest book because, heck, there's another one on the way next year.

And it's likely that Elmore Leonard is a victim of such a syndrome -- that he's lost the attentions (if not necessarily the affections) of some of his fanatical readers as they turned their attentions to new generations of Leonard acolytes -- Robert Crais, Carl Hiassen, George Pelecanos, and such. But Pagan Babies is proof, if any is needed, that the master has earned each and every one of the countless accolades that have been showered on him over the years. He has not lost a step and might, in fact, be better than ever. Like airline pilots whose dependability inspires the passengers' confidence -- you know where you're going and that they'll take you there -- Elmore Leonard can be counted on to be steady at the wheel and deliver you to your destination. That's the kind of trust he's earned from crime caper aficionados after 37 novels (give or take). And from this opening blast of a sentence ("The church had become a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years ..."), Pagan Babies is 100% pure Leonard.

This time out he takes us to Rwanda, where the horrible civil war between the Hutu and Tutsi continues to rage, seemingly with no end in sight. Moreover, it appears to be not so much a war as a genocide wherein Hutu slaughter defenseless Tutsi men, women, and children by the dozens. In a tiny Rwandan village in the midst of these atrocities, we find unconventional missionary Father Terry Dunn. The good father tends to the locals' spiritual needs in a hit-or-miss fashion. He follows an irregular schedule of Mass-saying and confession-hearing. His implacably cavalier attitude toward the Ten Commandments and the sacraments make it unlikely that he is on the Vatican's short list for promotion. His few parishioners can't help but notice his fondness for Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch and the comely housekeeper who appears to know Father Terry better than anyone else -- in every sense. When Father Terry is summoned home to Detroit for his mother's funeral, puzzling inconsistencies and mysteries begin to emerge from his life's shadowy corners.

Before he departs, there's the matter of Bernard, the Hutu man with the green shirt who confessed to the priest (or boasted, take your pick) that he and his friends massacred the 47 Tutsi parishioners whose bodies still, after five years, lay unattended-to in the village church. And upon arrival in Detroit, Terry's attorney brother Fran announces a need to clear up a cigarette-smuggling indictment that was handed down before young Terry Dunn donned the robes and headed off to Africa (surely our good priest is innocent, isn't he?). Like so many things in life, and like everything in an Elmore Leonard caper, circumstances are not quite as they appear. The plot turns early and often with whiplash speed. The characters we meet change chameleonlike, and not even the color of their hats helps tell the good guys from the bad. The Terry Dunn who left Detroit is quite different from the Father Dunn tending his church flock in a Rwandan village. Pagan Babies is a riot of shameless con artistry and silicon-smooth dialogue, a neo-classic of comic crime with a full slate of bumptious crooks and faithless accomplices.

It's interesting to speculate how things would have turned out if Leonard had kept the story in Rwanda and written a wholly different kind of novel. The opening sequences assume a different tone and style than we're accustomed to from Leonard. But by any measure, Elmore Leonard is still here and still a pure joy to read. More in This Issue The novel script - SFGate The novel script Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 25, 2004 Photo: PAUL SANCYA Close Image 1 of 1 ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS, FEB. 14-17--Elmore Leonard, who has spent half a century writing novels, screenplays and short stories, talks in his Bloomfield Village, Mich., home Dec. 11, 2001. At a time when many 76-year-olds might consider slowing down a bit, Leonard released his 37th novel, "Tishomingo Blues" on Jan. 29, 2002. It's part of a three-book deal he signed last summer with new publisher William Morrow. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) CAT HFR 02-14-02.

ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS, FEB. 14-17. DIGITAL CAMERA less ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS, FEB. 14-17--Elmore Leonard, who has spent half a century writing novels, screenplays and short stories, talks in his Bloomfield Village, Mich., home Dec. 11, 2001. At a time when ... more Photo: PAUL SANCYA 1 / 1 Back to Gallery 2004-01-25 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- When "The Big Bounce" opens Friday, the film will feature a "based upon" credit for Elmore Leonard , even though the 78-year-old crime writer had no creative involvement in the project. He can only hope this remake turns out better than the first "Big Bounce." When the original version came out in 1969, Leonard walked out of the theater after only 15 minutes. "It was just a bad movie," he says, speaking by phone from a hotel in Washington, D.C., where he's promoting "Mr. Paradise," his new crime novel.

"The producer's son wrote the screenplay." But Leonard says he remains optimistic whenever Hollywood retells one of his tales. Over the past decade, three Elmore Leonard stories arrived onscreen in the form of the whip-smart caper films "Get Shorty" (1995), " Jackie Brown " (1997) and "Out of Sight" (1998). By the time "Get Shorty" made him hip in Hollywood, Leonard had already seen 14 of his novels turned into movies. Some, like Paul Newman 's 1967 "Hombre," succeeded within the Western genre Leonard specialized in during the '50s. Others, like "52 Pick-Up" (1986), incorporated the dark wit Leonard began experimenting with after realizing his original role model, Ernest Hemingway , "didn't have much of a sense of humor, if any." In the 1960s, Leonard says, he "got a little more relaxed and began to have more fun with the writing." Several adaptations, including Burt Reynolds ' "Stick," missed the mark entirely.

Leonard, who penned the "Stick" screenplay himself, used to keep a poster of the movie; in place of the film's tagline -- "The only thing he couldn't stick to were the rules" -- Leonard crossed out "rules" and substituted "script." The problem, Leonard says: "They got too serious and emphasized the action rather than the characters, and the characters are the most important element in my books. I try to make them human, so they're recognizable. They're not just bad guys who wear black. They have other lives, too. I let them tell me what's going to happen and just make up the plot as I go along." Movie studios frequently failed to get on Leonard's wavelength, even after his first best-seller, "Glitz," was published in 1985. "I adapted 'Glitz' for Lorimar," he says. "I sent them my script and reported to their offices and the head of the company said, 'All you did was adapt the book.' I knew I was in trouble then. When the screenwriter is hired, he has to come up with changes, on principle. That's the way it works, and because of that I've quit writing screenplays.

You just have to please too many people. With a book, I entertain myself and that's it." It was director Barry Sonnenfeld who finally did justice to Leonard's sardonic sensibility. After reading his 1990 novel "Get Shorty," Sonnenfeld envisioned Danny DeVito as the charming gangster Chili Palmer. DeVito, busy producing "Pulp Fiction" at the time, optioned the film rights but passed the part on to John Travolta . Besides the dead-on casting, "Get Shorty" benefited from a rare moviemaking phenomenon: The writer's opinion actually counted for something. "On the set after watching a scene, Barry would come over to me and say, 'Do you have any suggestions?' That never happens in Hollywood," Leonard says. "I said to Barry, 'When somebody delivers a funny line, I hope you don't cut to another person to get his reaction with a grin or a wink or something because these people are serious' -- that's the main thing. It's got to be left up to the audience, to laugh or not. And that's the way he did it.

During one rehearsal, Barry said to Gene Hackman , 'God that was really funny,' and Hackman said, 'I wasn't trying to be.' And Barry said, 'That's the point -- you weren't trying to be.' " Scott Frank , who wrote the "Get Shorty" screenplay and also adapted "Out of Sight," the Steven Soderbergh -directed thriller starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez , checked in regularly, Leonard says. "When Scott had a change he'd call and ask, 'What do you think of this?' He and I disagreed on the ending. I said, 'It's her story. I ended the book with her.' And he said, 'Yeah, it's her book, but it's his movie.' And when I saw the picture I realized he was right. It has to be kind of an uplifting idea at the end, that maybe he'll escape again." Leonard considers "Jackie Brown," based on his novel "Rum Punch," the most faithful page-to-screen translation of his work. " Quentin Tarantino understands me better than anybody," Leonard says. "He's been a fan of mine ever since he was a teenager and stole one of my novels from a bookstore.

He was punished but then he went back and stole it again. Right after 'Reservoir Dogs,' Quentin wanted to buy 'Rum Punch' because three of the same characters were in that same book, 'The Switch,' that he'd stolen 13 years earlier." The Elmore Leonard mystique continues to hold sway among filmmakers -- at least nine projects are in various stages of development. Studios count on his stories to attract acting talent hungry for juicy showcase roles, and it doesn't hurt that Leonard structures his novels in a format easily grasped by development execs. "The studio people option the books because they're laid out, not unlike a movie, in scenes and dialogue," Leonard says. Dialogue provides the meat of Leonard's narrative matter. "I want to move the action as much as possible through dialogue so that everything you learn about people comes from them and not from me," said Leonard. "I want to keep my nose out of it. I want to remain invisible. I don't want to intrude and get in the way of my prose, especially with the kind of characters I write, who are uneducated people for the most part.

I don't want anybody in my book who's smarter than I am, (and that way) I can keep them talking, you see?" Relying on dialogue to reveal the characters, Leonard lets the characters drive the plot. "When I start a novel, I wait till I get to page 300 in the manuscript -- where I've got about 50 pages to go -- and then I look ahead. Like in 'Mr. Paradise,' I had no idea where that one would go. Then I find a character I like, who's kind of a surprise, and they'll have something to do with the ending." Leonard has a spoiler alert for fans preparing to dive into "Mr. Paradise.

" Two sexy models and their sugar daddy dominate the start of the story, but Leonard says a new character he discovered a few pages into his story wound up playing a key role: "Keep your eye on Lloyd, the house man." A long love affair with Leonard There's plenty more Elmore percolating through the Hollywood pipeline: John Travolta begins filming next month on "Be Cool," reprising his role as Chili Palmer in this sequel to "Get Shorty." Written in 1999 by Leonard at MGM's request, the novel shifts the action from movies to music. Quentin Tarantino and Miramax have the rights to adapt "Killshot," a 1989 Leonard book about a half-Indian, half-French Canadian hit man plying his trade in the Midwest. John Malkovich 's production company Mr. Mudd plans to adapt "Freaky Deaky, " Leonard's 1988 novel about former '60s activists in Detroit caught up in an extortion caper. Kathy Bates is putting together a deal that would have her adapting and directing the 2000 novel "Pagan Babies," set in Rwanda during the 1990s.

Catherine Zeta Jones plans to star in "Cuba Libre," Leonard's 1998 novel set in Cuba during the Spanish-American war in 1898. Producer Tony Bill ("The Sting") wants to direct "Swag," Leonard's 1976 novel, one of four featuring the Jack Ryan character introduced in "The Big Bounce." Don Cheadle, who co-starred in "Out of Sight," wants to direct an adaptation of "Tishomingo Blues," Leonard's 2002 novel about a stunt diver who wanders into trouble in a Mississippi casino. Paramount has optioned "Tenkiller" for Bruce Willis, based on a Leonard short story about a rodeo stunt man who returns from Hollywood to find trouble brewing on his ranch. Veteran producer Walter Mirisch has been working with Joel and Ethan Coen to adapt "La Brava" for Universal Films, based on Leonard's 1983 book about an Old West prison break. -- Hugh Hart Latest from the SFGATE homepage: Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more.

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Question: Which crime writer wrote the novel 'Pagan Babies'?
Answer: ELMORE LEONARD